Nordwestblock

The Nordwestblock ("Northwest Block") is a hypothetical Northwestern European cultural region that several scholars propose as a prehistoric culture in the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, and northwest Germany in an area approximately bounded by the rivers Somme, Oise, Meuse, and Elbe, and possibly extending to the eastern part of what is now England, during the Bronze and Iron Ages from the 3rd to 1st millennia BCE up to the onset of historical sources in the 1st century BCE.

The theory was first proposed by two authors working independently, and Maurits Gysseling, whose proposal included research indicating that another language may have existed somewhere in between Germanic and Celtic in the Belgian region.

The term Nordwestblock itself was coined by Hans Kuhn, who considered the inhabitants of this area neither Germanic nor Celtic, thus attributing to the people a distinct ethnicity or culture up to the Iron Age.

Concerning the language spoken by the Iron Age Nordwestblock population, Kuhn speculated on linguistic affinity to the Venetic language, other hypotheses connect the Northwestblock with the Raetic ("Tyrsenian") or generic Centum Indo-European (Illyrian, "Old European"). Gysseling suspected an intermediate Belgian language between Germanic and Celtic, that might have been affiliated to Italic. According to Luc van Durme, a Belgian linguist, toponymic evidence to a former Celtic presence in the Low Countries is near to utterly absent. Kuhn noted that since Proto-Indo-European (PIE) /b/ was very rare, and since this PIE /b/, via Grimm's law, is the main source of regularly inherited /p/'s in words in Germanic languages (except after fricatives, e.g. *sp-), the many words with /p/'s which do occur must have some other language as source. Similarly, in Celtic, PIE /p/ disappeared and in regularly inherited words only reappeared in p-Celtic languages as a result of proto-Celtic *kʷ becoming *p. All this taken together means that any word starting with a /p/ in a Germanic language which is not evidently borrowed from either Latin or a p-Celtic language (such as Gaulish) must be a loan from another language, and these words Kuhn ascribes to the Nordwestblock language.

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